The Idiot vocabulary

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shoal


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Definition:
1. a large school of fish; by extension a crowd of people
2. shallow area in a body of water

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Uses:
"You must have told somebody you were going to trot out the champagne, and that's why they are all come!" muttered Rogojin, as the two entered the verandah. "We know all about that! You've only to whistle and they come up in shoals!" he continued, almost angrily. He was doubtless thinking of his own late experiences with his boon companions.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The Idiot (1887)
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As a fish large enough to swallow Jonah could not swim through the shoal-water to reach the land, it becomes an interesting query to know how it got Jonah on to "the dry land." It must have required the use of a powerful emetic to inspire the fish with force sufficient to throw him fifty or a hundred feet.

Kersey and Lydia Graves. The Bible of Bibles (1879)
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a little squat shoal-lighthouse on open piles stood crippled in the mud on stilts and crutches;

Charles Dickens. Great Expectations (1861)
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the sea was discolouring with the red of the blood from his heart. First it was dark as a shoal in the blue water taht was more than a mile deep.

Ernest Hemingway. The Old Man and the Sea, p.94 (1952)
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sheets tumbled in blinding shoals of white like the sands of a beach.

Diana Gabaldon. Outlander (1991)
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we were guided between certain shoals and rocks, which are very dangerous in the passage, to a large basin, where a fleet may ride in safety within a cable’s length of the town-wall.

Jonathan Swift. Gulliver's Travels Into Several Remote Regions of the World (1726)
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